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Utah Indie Games Night - May 2015

Well we had a couple of minor setbacks (issues with sound system and main speaker unable to come), but overall it was a successful Indie Game Night this past Wednesday. We had a good turnout of around 40 people, and UVU hosted it again in room 404, but amazingly everyone seemed to find it okay. ;) There were lots of great demos and discussions happening, but unfortunately I wasn't able to catch them all (never was good at Pokemon).

Our speaker Adam Ames hurt his back and was unable to attend, so we watched the now legendary talk "Juice it or Lose it" by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho. If you haven't seen it, you can watch it here. The talk is all about doing little things that can enhance and bring more life into your game.

After that we opened the time to do game demos. Here's the ones I'm aware of (but I missed a lot of them)

Spirits of Elduurn
Curtis showed me his PS Vita version of Spirits of Elduurn. It's a bit different from the PC version, which is more of a puzzle game. In this one, the main objective is to smash all the demons on the touch screen (using you fingers) before they get away. There is also one bomb to kill them all if you get overwhelmed. It was a very fun and simple game.

Dub Wars
Joe showed me some of the new art from a new artist that will be going into Dub Wars. It looks great. He also mentioned that they'll be taking an elemental approach to weapons, so that sounds like it might be a great update to the game.

Dungeon Goer
Eric showed me his latest game, in the vein of his last Space Goer game. This one is a bit more Crossy Road like. The gameplay and blocky art are similar to Crossy Road, but this is in a dungeon setting, with spears and saw blades coming at you. Looks good thus far.

MiniCiv (working title)
Steve was showing his mini Civilization like game. It's based on Civilization, but looks like pulls in elements from Settlers of Catan. I didn't get a chance to play it myself, but it looks like he's put a lot of work into the fundamentals and the AI. He had a mode where the AI's would just battle each other, and it was mesmerizing to watch.

Mana Mania
This game was done for the gospel app and game contest at the LDSTech conference last year. The portion I saw had you flying on a giant bee in space and you had to fly through a series of green rings (similar to a lot 3D flight games out there). It definitely had some interesting visuals.

Lair of the Morlocks
The Deli Interactive guys made a short game for the Public Domain Jam. Their game was a physics platformer based on The Time Machine by HG Wells. You are in the Morlock caverns trying to get your time machine back. You don't have any weapons, so you have to use rocks other things from your environment to kill the Morlocks. Then you have to find the keys to get to your time machine and win. I got a kick out of the ragdoll physics with the Morlocks. It was strangely entertaining to push the dead ones around.

Simulacrum (working title)
This one is a futuristic platformer with pixel art graphics. There's vines to climb, platforms to leap on, pigeons to annoy, bombs to avoid, and little robot helper that helps you to float down slowly to safety. What more could you ask for? It's definitely unique and I had fun playing it.